What If We Removed The Glamour From Grief?
I have been healing from heartbreak for a long time now. Longer than I thought possible.
Wait! Before you start interpreting what “heartbreak” means, I invite you to just sit with the word.
Say it.
Say it slowly.
Notice how the word rolls off your tongue, and notice how it feels in the body.
Heartbreak.
I know that you already assumed I am talking about a romantic heartbreak.
You’re right. I am.
But what I am writing about is not limited only to the breakdown of a romantic relationship. I am no stranger to grieving my shame, my identity, my family, my career…
… all culminating today in how my grief is asking me to stay.
Battling Against Heartbreak
For as long as I can remember, I have launched a great battle against heartbreak. Not grief; heartbreak.
The notion of a heartbreak always rubbed me the wrong way.
It imbued in me a sort of hatred and pessimism about the world and the way things are made out to be.
It made me question love — what IS the meaning of love if it doesn’t last? If it doesn’t ground? If it doesn’t know how to stay?
I didn’t love like that! I doubt any (inner) child does… So, surely, the kind of love I believed in MUST exist!
At some point, this kind of hope became my lifeline — I clung to it as I fought other battles in my life and as I fought to exist. This lifeline gave substance to my existence.
Then, as an adult, I did encounter love. I encountered myself through it: the childlike capacity to love no matter what, through thick and thin, and to love strong and long.
But the world is rarely kind to children; much less a child’s way of loving!
As each of my encounters ended in heartbreak, I fought the feeling. I fought the idea of a heartbreak because the world told me,
“Grow up. This is real life. This is adult love, and loss is real.”
I also fought to prevent heartbreak:
I tried to fix the way I loved, I tried to make the right choices, I tried to prevent loss at any cost, and I braced endlessly for another blow to the child in me that just wanted to love like herself.
But the problem was not facing the loss. I did not need to go through the five stages and reach acceptance. What I was battling instead was the voices of supposed adults around me curating for me what love should look like.
We Understand our Experiences Through Language
… and often this is constructed by others.
When I was at my lowest and didn’t know how to hold my own pain, like any person I reached out to friends, to articles, to anything and anyone who could help me name and share this burden for a while.
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I heard several things that made me fight heartbreak harder.
My therapist said, “But you’ll see, this experience will enrich your life!”
My friend said, “The only way out is through”
Another said, “Don’t fuck up your life over this”
Another said, “He doesn’t deserve your tears!”
Online, the space was rife with narratives like, “Grief is just love that has nowhere to go” and “You don’t miss him! You’re missing the part of yourself that came alive through that experience.”
I hated all of these. I hated that admitting to “heartbreak” put me in a vulnerable, powerless position. I felt unbearably childlike.
I loved my friends for showing up to help me; I deeply empathised with those of us navigating loss; I appreciated having a therapist to talk to at this time. But I hated how none of them could help me hold my pain without talking down to me.
I fought battles within myself trying to explain what I was actually feeling, and justifying how whatever the others were saying was doing nothing to empower me.
And suddenly one evening, I felt a wave of exhaustion that pulled me towards rest and… wanting to just stay.
Staying.
It’s been a year and a half since the deep exhaustion pulled me inwards.
And this morning, I saw the words “recovering from heartbreak” in an Instagram reel, and could finally tell myself,
“Yes, I am recovering from heartbreak too.”
And I felt a kind of sadness that was devoid of any meanings or implications about my value, who loved more, and where I stood/stand.
Where my feelings were once saturated with meaning, today, they are just feelings. No words, no comparisons, and no longer debilitating!
When I asked myself, “What does this feeling want to do if I don’t interrupt it?” —
I heard, “This is making me want to stop running away.”
The Capacity to Stay
I am not writing this piece to talk about my loss; I am writing to rip away the neat packaging of glamorised grief narratives.
Where the world’s strategy of dealing with heartbreak turns toward:
trying to figure things out quickly
protecting ourselves from feeling too much
staying one step ahead of pain
needing clarity before allowing feeling…
Removing these scripts from my grief, I have gained the capacity to stay.
I am reminded of a quote from one of the therapists I talked to while conducting my doctoral study on the wounded-healer process:
“Yes, I am wounded, but… If I can sit with my wounds, I know that I can sit with yours too, and not shy away from it.”
Perhaps by gaining this capacity to stay with my own grief, I can sit with the depth of the grief of those I work with. And from the depths of unglamorised grief might sprout maturity and the ability to love authentically.
